Good Mission 7 - Erebor

Your first course of action should be to delete every mine in Erebor. All your starting mines have efficiancy somewhere around 50%, which, as you start to add more mines, will actually lower your income more than it will increase it. Make sure you get every last one, then start building replacements. Never build a mine lower than 95% efficiancy. Erebor is a very wide and open map, so take advantage of that. Build two extra workers (four total is a good number for when you're starting out, but you won't need them all later on) and start filling the map with mines. Once your first mine is done, use the Dwarven Riches power (if you don't have it, purchase it immediately). Keep building mines until you have about 12. Be sure to constantly use dwarven riches every time it recharges to keep that income flowing.

While building up your economic infrastructure, move your starting army to the lower left corner of the map. Send someone to the lower right corner to capture the signal flare (this will be vital for recharging dwarven riches). Upgrade your archery range to level 2 and one of your forge works to level 3. Demolish any spare structures (you should have one forge works, one hall of warriors, one archery range. Turn everything else into extra cash). You'll want to research every upgrade except siege hammers. Those are quite useless, seeing as Mordor will never establish a base. Whenever you make new units, be sure to purchase every upgrade immediately. You'll spend a lot on fortifications, seeing as you'll hit the population limit very early in your preparations, but no matter how many fortresses you build the critical fighting will be done by those units.

Now it's time to start building up your defences. Your first course of action is to fill out your army. Three groups of phalanx, three groups of Men of Dale, and three dwarven catapults will be absolutely necessary, since your starting army lacks a way to counter mumakil and attack trolls (the most deadly units Mordor will send at you) and isn't very potent at long ranges. Fill up the rest of your command points as you see fit. If you purchased the nine units prescribed above, your army should be properly balanced, anyways. Now you'll want to build your fortresses. Build them near the edge of the map so that their catapult extensions will be in range of the Mordor troops when they step into the map. Be sure to defend them while they're in construction, so that the Mordor raiders won't demolish them while they're still helpless. You'll want at least three here to stop the first attack, but if you follow the economic instructions I gave earlier to the letter, you can easily afford more than that.

Next, make an extra group of phalanx and send them to the lower right corner of the map. After the first real attack wave, Mordor will launch a sneak attack with trolls here. Some phalanx backed up by a fortress will make short work of the sneak attack, just be sure to put some catapult extensions behind the fortress. Make sure that the fortress is fairly close to the bottom edge of the map so that the trolls can't use their long ranged rock-throw attack outside of its retaliation range.

Back at your main defensive line, keep upgrading your fortress (Dwarven Stonework and Masterworks Munitions are the most important, but Boiling Oil and Siege Kegs are also excellent investments). Don't bother yourself with walls, seeing as they'll actually cause you more trouble in terms of moving your units around then it will cause the enemy. Instead, just build a chain of fortresses in a V pattern against the edge of the map so that no Mordor units can escape by. By now, you should have already dispatched the first waves of Corsairs and Haradrim, and you'll be running out of time before the main attack wave. As a last touch, add in a few hearths behind your fortresses (think of it as a hospital), and whenever a battallion is seriously wounded, send them back here to heal. Upgrade your fortresses with a good mix of towers and catapult extensions (build the catapults at the back to take advantage of their long range), and add a few Hall extensions to garrison your men of dale. In the last seconds before the Mordor hosts arrive, make sure that your pikemen are in front of your archers and guardians so that the mumakil get speared on their initial charge. Make sure King Dain is in position so every gets maximum benefit from his leadership.

The battle itself should be fairly mechanical. If you have enough firepower, the Mordor units should be toasted almost as quickly as they enter the screen. Make sure to use the Boiling Oil if you purchased it, and focus your catapults on siege rams and mumakil. Don't use any higher end powers; if you're having that much trouble now, you'll need them later. The first wave might take out a fortress or even two, but you should be able to defeat it without losing too much of your army. As soon as the wave is defeated, the trolls will launch a sneak attack from the lower right. If you set up your defences well enough, they too will be slaughtered as they enter the map.

Now it's time to start repairing. Demolish the fortress on the lower right of the map where the trolls attacked. Mordor won't try to attack there again and it's best put to work as 50% of its basic value (be sure to demolish any extensions first in order to get their value, as well). Now you want to replace any losses you sustained in the main battle. If a fortress went down, build a new one in its place (and if you've learned a thing or two, maybe you can place it better). Filling your command points back to capacity is top priority, and be sure to keep a nice mix of Men of Dale, Phalanx, and Catapults. Once you've replaced your losses, you can focus on improving the existing defences. More fortresses, more firepower, more coverage. The next wave will be a lot wider and you'll need to cover a bit more of the map's edge. As well, there will be another sneak attack next round, this time against the upper left entrance. These ones will be corsairs, and if you build a fortress they will just run past it. The best solution is a little creativity. Build a fortress with some space in front of it, and some space behind it. Fill it with lots of towers and purchase both masterworks munitions and boiling oil. Now build a wall segment in front of the fortress, and a wall segment behind it. Fill those segments with towers, and perhaps a postern gate. You should be able to clean up the vast majority of those corsairs while they're busy scaling your walls. Then dump some boiling oil as they run by the fortress itself to pick off even more of them. Once you're satisfied with these defences, put a battlewagon with the banners upgrade in the mountain itself to catch any survivors. If you're feeling extremely lazy, you can just use Tom Bombadil or the Barrage power when the time comes to clean up the corsairs, but those powers are wasted against such weak units (plus it's not nearly as fun that way ;-)

Now it's back to upgrading your defences and preparing for the next wave. Not much more to say here; you probably should have the idea by now. If you run out of space, build a fortress or two in Dale itself. In addition to serving as a backup defence in case some Mordor units slip through, this will satisfy one of your bonus objectives.

The next wave will be a lot more intimidating than the first, but your defences should be, too. Again, the Mordor hosts might take out a few fortresses, but if you've built your defences right the other nearby fortresses should be able to take most of the bite out of the Mordor army. If you need to, you might want to use some special powers, but save most of them to clean up stragglers who get through. Once the wave is over, you will notice the corsair attack to the upper left (a lot of them, isn't there?). A good chunk should die to your fortress, then simply destroy the rest with your battlewagon. If worse comes to worse, use your mine network to get back to base and deal with the rest.

By now, you should know what to do; repair any damage you took, remove the fortress to the upper left (they won't try a sneak attack from that direction again), and improve your defences further. There will be another sneak attack after the final wave, but this one will actually appear inside the mountain itself. To guard against it, build a fortress directly in front of the throne of Erebor. The final sneak attack is the smallest, so one good fully upgraded fortress should do the trick (if you're nervous, leave a mine entrance nearby so that you can get back quickly). The final attack will be crazy with attack trolls, so be sure to get extra phalanx and catapults. Those units deal the most damage to those devastating trolls. With your fortresses in place to absorb the pounding, there's not a lot more to be afraid of. Put simply, if you haven't lost too many fortresses, you should have a defensive barrier so strong that it's pretty well impenitrable by now, and if you haven't lost any mines, you should have such a high income with dwarven riches that you can just keep building new fortresses perpetually. Unless you made a grave error in one of the earlier waves, you're effectively unbeatable by this point. Just don't underestimate that final sneak attack, and you can't possibly lose!